Going to New York

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  When I tried to imagine what deep dark secret Donna could possibly be hiding from me, I told myself that even if she had been a prostitute in the past, I would still love her and be with her.

  Now I really was faced with that very situation, with a girl who really had been through all that stuff. I gave Alice a hug and a kiss and told her I was glad she told me the truth. She started to tear up.

  She still came over all the time after that. I didn't ask her to do any more work on the computer though, but I kept paying her anyway. I really cared about her at this point, and I couldn't bear the thought of her going back to having sex with all these other guys. I'd rather just give her money than have her go back to escorting. I didn't realize at the time that I was her enabler. I was making it easy for her to be an addict. So why would she ever stop?

  We started doing the kind of things I used to do with Liz: we went out to eat, got massages at fancy spas, visited museums and shows like Cirque du Soleil and Wicked in Manhattan, and so on. Now that I knew she needed heroin to get through the day, she didn't hide it from me anymore. It became normal to me that she shot up two or three times a day. To me it was almost like she was a diabetic. They need injections of insulin to feel ok. Was heroin really all that different? Well, yeah, of course it was. I was really just deluding myself.

  Eventually I kept asking her to go back to rehab, but she didn't want to. Of course not. Why would she? She wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. She wanted to have a nice life AND do drugs. Normally you can only have one or the other, but I was making her life as addict easier and more comfortable than it had ever been.

  She told me that she had tried rehab twice, and failed twice, so it was pointless. She said: "I'll quit when I'm ready."

  "So, when is that gonna be?" I asked.

  "I don't know. But not today."

  That was her standard answer. I learned later that that's what all addicts say: "Yeah, I'll quit eventually. But not today." It's never today. That's the nature of addiction. The rational part of your brain knows that you should quit, and you really want to quit at some point, but not today. "Today I want to get high."

  It doesn't even matter what you're addicted to. The principle is always the same. Even when it comes to food: "I know I need to stop eating candy and junk food. I know I should go on a diet. But not today. Maybe tomorrow. So I might as well enjoy eating candy and junk food today. A lot."

  And when people tell themselves they will start a diet tomorrow, they feel it's ok to binge one last time today. Might as well make the most of today! So they stuff their face with way more food than they would normally eat, because the good times will be over tomorrow.

  But then, when tomorrow comes, you really don't feel like starting the diet yet, so you allow yourself one more day of binging. And another one. And another one. Sometimes the thought of going on a diet soon actually makes you eat more.

  And then there's the what-the-hell effect:

  "I was doing so good on my diet, but then I screwed up today and ate a donut. What the hell, since today is already a lost day anyway, I might as well stuff my face with the whole box of donuts."

  Drug addicts think the same way: They know they shouldn't do drugs. And if they have been clean for a while and screw up even just once, they feel now they might as well do a bunch more, until they go back to being clean. But of course once they start using again, the thought of getting clean is quickly forgotten.

  Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing. Like hacking.

  When you push someone's head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber.

  And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.

  Anyway, I went all out to show Alice how nice life could be if she were sober. I thought if I give her an incentive that's good enough, she will want to get clean and stay clean. So I asked her to come to Hawaii with me for ten days.

  She was scared at first. Drug addicts don't like to go too far away from the place where they get their drugs. It's like they're mentally chained to it. Flying half way around the world, thousands of miles away from her dope boy, was a terrifying idea.

  THERE IS NO GOD

  "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form."

  "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."

  "I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation."

  Albert Einstein

  "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality"

  George Bernard Shaw

  "All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

  Lucretius

  "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

  Seneca the Younger

  "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."

  Adolf Hitler

  Alice didn't really talk to her mother anymore, but she talked to her grandma Gina in Tennessee a lot. When she told Gina she was afraid to go to Hawaii, Gina asked to talk to me. Alice gave her my number.

  Gina called me and asked me about my intentions with Alice. I explained to her how I felt about her granddaughter, and that I wanted to show her a better life and convince her to get sober. We talked for over two hours. She wanted to know more about me, so I told her about my alcoholic father and how he had been the perfect negative role model, and that he made me want to be a better man than him, because I wanted to be nothing like him. And I told her what it was like to be married to Donna. And about my experiences with the girls I had met before Alice.

  Gina could tell that I was not just some sleazy guy trying to get in her granddaughter's pants. She could tell I was sincere and that I genuinely cared about Alice. She understood that I didn't just see Alice as some drug addicted whore and I didn't just want to use her as my vacation sex toy. Gina loved me.

  She was a very religious woman and told me she believed God had sent me to save Alice's life. She literally called me an angel sent by God. I was flattered, but it also made me feel pretty awkward. I was honest with her and told her I'm not religious at all. I told her I don't mind, if other people believe in God and it enriches their lives. It just doesn't do anything for me.

  The one thing I didn't tell her was that when I was a teenager, my hacker name used to be Lucifer. Gina probably would have flipped out and tried to perform an exorcism on me.

  She couldn't understand why I
don't believe in God. I guess she had never really met someone who didn't believe in something that was so fundamental in her own life.

  I told her that I grew up in Northern Europe, and people over there are far less religious than Americans. To most Europeans, the bible is really nothing more than a book of ancient fables, similar to Grimm's Fairy Tales. To many Europeans, it's bizarre that so many Americans still believe in gods, devils, angels and demons. It's like Americans are stuck in the Dark Ages.

  I explained to her that as a teenager in Germany, I had studied theology at a catholic private school, and some of my classmates actually ended up becoming priests. So it's not like I hadn't heard the word of God before. And it's not like I was ignorant about who Jesus was, or supposedly was.

  In those theology classes, we had to read up on different ancient philosophers. Some argued in favor of the existence of a god, and some argued against his existence. I knew that I was supposed to write in my essays, why the philosophers who believed in God were right. But honestly, I felt the philosophers who said he didn't exist made a lot more sense to me.

  There are two religious concepts that contradict each other: There's the idea of free will, and then there's the fatalist idea of predetermination. Those two ideas are polar opposites. Free will means we are the masters of our own future. Predetermination means God is in control of everything, and everything that's about to happen to us was already predetermined by someone other than ourselves, so our fate is not in our hands.

  Whenever you ask a believer why God allows bad things to happen, they'll say that God doesn't interfere in free will. If someone chooses to do something bad, and it has bad consequences, it's supposedly not God's fault. He supposedly had nothing to do with it. Because if he had stopped it, he would have interfered in that person's free will.

  But didn't God create the bad man, with all his bad habits? No, the believers say. God is always good, God never does anything bad, and anything bad about that man is a result of his own free will.

  Meanwhile, believers also say the exact opposite, whenever it is convenient for them: everything happens for a reason. Everything that happens is part of God's great plan. If something happens that looks bad to us, it's just because we don't understand God's great plan, and how that bad stuff fits into the bigger picture.

  Well, if it's true that everything that happens is part of God's plan, then we really don't have free will at all.

  Take the Holocaust for example: why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn't want to step on Hitler's toes and interfere with his free will? That's a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those Jews who died? I'm pretty sure that getting gassed to death was obviously not their choice.

  So, was the Holocaust part of God's great plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn't answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler drop dead?

  Why didn't God just make Hitler have a heart attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn't he simply prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust?

  Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to understand God's divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the greater good that came out of the Holocaust?

  If that were true, and everything that happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God's perfect plan, then that means that Hitler really wasn't a bad man at all. He was actually doing God's work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was supposed to do in God's great plan, then Hitler obviously didn't have free will, but was just God's puppet. So that means Hitler was a good guy. A man of God.

  Sorry, but there is no religion in the world that could sell me on believing THAT bullshit.

  So that's my problem with free will versus predetermination. But it gets worse: both of those concepts contradict the idea that God answers prayers, like a genie in a bottle who makes wishes come true.

  If God didn't come down from heaven to smite Hitler before he could kill millions of people, or at least snap his fingers and make Hitler die of a heart attack before he could start World War 2, although clearly millions of people were praying to God for just that to happen, then why would God answer your prayer when you have a flat tire and you're stuck all alone in the woods? If God won't spare the lives of millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children, then why would he answer your prayer when you ask for your hospitalized grandpa not to die from cancer?

  To me, prayer is completely useless as a solution to any problem. It really just makes you feel better about yourself, without actually doing anything to solve the problem. The way I see it, it's really just a way for people who sit on their asses and do nothing, to feel like they're magically helping someone in need.

  If Timmy needs a new kidney, don't sit at home and talk to yourself and pretend you're helping Timmy by talking to God for him. If you want to help Timmy, get off your ass and donate some blood or collect money for a new kidney, or take Timmy's parents into your home if they can no longer afford to pay rent, because of the high medical bills. Do something!

  And as far as Alice was concerned: It wasn't going to help her one bit if I sit at home or at church and "talk to God" about Alice. That wasn't going to do a damn thing for her. Because if God didn't influence Hitler in any kind of positive way, then why would God influence Alice in any kind of way, and violate her free will by making her go to rehab or changing her mind about liking drugs? And why would he do that anyway, if it's true that everything happens for a reason, and her getting raped and abused and becoming a drug addict was part of his great predetermined plan to begin with?

  I thought I had lost Gina when I told her how I felt about all that, but she was actually very interested in what I had to say and very open-minded. She listened to every word I said, without making me feel like a crazy, blasphemous heathen who was going to burn in hell for saying these things. She agreed that there are a lot of hypocrites who go to church and pretend they are good Christians, but then never really do anything to actually help someone else.

  I agreed. I told her that I have nothing against God or religion. If believing in an invisible friend who looks out for you makes you feel better about your life, why not? If having religion in your life makes you do good things for other people, why not?

  My only problem with religion is that there are so many self-righteous people who pretend to be good Christians, and then really just do selfish, evil things, supposedly in the name of their God. How can you claim that your God has a problem with gay people? If God really created everything, then he created everyone, black, white, straight, gay, tall, short, Christian and Muslim. Don't go around telling other people they won't go to heaven just because they won't buy into your personal superstitions.

  Gina asked me if I believed in heaven. I told her that if there really is life after death, then it's a natural process, that happens to everyone equally, whether they are good or bad. Just like in my drowning example earlier. Everyone drowns if their head is under water too long. It doesn't matter if you are a good or a bad person.

  And if human beings really have some kind of spiritual energy or soul that can exist outside of the physical body after death, then we all come equipped with one. And whatever happens to that soul after death is just a natural process. As natural as drowning.

  Do I believe anything happens after death? No. I think once we're dead, we're dead. You are who you are today, because of all your past experiences. You burned your tongue on a potato, and suddenly you don't like potatoes anymore. The color purple reminds you of your prom and the first time you made love to your spouse. So now you love the color purple. All that information of who you are and what you like is stored in your brain.

  Look at Alzheimer's patients. Somewhere in their brain, they have information stored about thei
r spouse of forty years. Then that part of the brain is destroyed, the information is lost, and suddenly they no longer remember who their spouse is.

  Or look at car accident survivors with brain damage. If the part of their brain is destroyed that stored their vocabulary, or their reading skills, they can suddenly no longer speak or read. Sure, through years of therapy they can try to learn what they lost, but the fact remains that it was lost.

  When you die, your brain is destroyed completely, and everything in it, everything that makes you you, is destroyed as well. Every bit of information that makes you who you are today, is gone. And that's why I don't believe I'll continue to float around as a ghost, or go to some kind of heaven, once my brain has died.

  Stephen Hawking, the famous wheelchair-bound physicist, is considered by many to be the smartest man alive. The Albert Einstein of our time. Hawking said: "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."